On Futurology

If history studies our past and social sciences study our present, what is the study of our future? Future(s) Studies (colloquially called "future(s)" by many of the field's practitioners) is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to hypothesize the possible, probable, preferable, or alternative future(s).

One of the fundamental assumptions in future(s) studies is that the future is plural rather than singular, that is, that it consists of alternative future(s) of varying degrees of likelihood but that it is impossible in principle to say with certainty which one will occur.

They're trying hard. The arguments fueling the FDA decision against 23andMe's service seems like a big step in that direction. My jaw dropped when I read a Scientific American blog arguing, essentially, that people are too dumb to know what to do with their own genetic information and therefore shouldn't have access to it. That's not an argument about some company's supposedly misleading claims -- that's a very dangerous argument about how people should be treated and what they should be allowed to have access to as technology advances.

PSA: It's not the lawyer's fault. They're just ones who understand the law and apply the law on behalf of their clients. They don't make the decision whether to pursue the course of action, or whether it is right or wrong. They merely act as instructed.

PSA: Large percentages of lawyers decide its monetarily better for them to bend the spirits of said law based on vague differences in definitions that exist now instead of when said laws were written.

Some lawyers are indeed good. However, when the majority of a profession is bent on using obvious loopholes not intended on being used to allow bad(relative to the perception of the whole) to continue to do bad(also relative) things, then they have no moral(relative to me) ground to be upset with the fact that a majority of people generalize the entire profession as bad.

Personal opinion at best... I like to think of lawyers as the Germans during WW2. Sure, some of you may not like what your kinsmen are doing. But you are still in the wrong for not even attempting to change it.

Depends on the type of law and who is plantiff vs defendent. Patent Trolls and Tax Attorneys are pretty much the devil, but plenty of lawyers are out there to sincerely help people. My girlfriend's mother is a lawyer, only takes charity cases, rescues people from landlords and banks who illegally lock people out of their homes.

I was, of course, immediately struck by the horror the video wished to evoke.

However, to consider this scenario in actual ethical terms, and not merely emotional ones, I do think that it is fair to ask where the likely enormous amount of money will come from to provide the services of the Lifetm system.

In modern terms, some people speak of education as a right, or unlimited health care, and that sounds great...but the money has to come from somewhere. In this scenario here, the money comes from advertisers and the product would otherwise be unaffordable. If you don't want some crappy F2P version of hugely expensive immortality, then don't use the product...